I am a professor and endowed professor at the University of Houston where I founded and direct the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture and head the graduate program in space architecture. My background deals extensively with research, planning and design of habitats, structures and other support systems for applications in space and extreme environments on Earth. I have recently written a new book titled "Climate of Corruption: Politics and Power Behind the Global Warming Hoax". It can be previewed and ordered at www.climateofcorruption.com. Additional information about my book and views can be found on my YouTube address: http://www.youtube.com/climateofcorruption.

Rick Perry Needn't Sweat His Global Warming Skepticism

Washington Post op-ed writer Richard Cohen is concerned that “Climate Change May Be Ruin of Perry Campaign.” Far less clear was whether he regards that imminent ruination to be a bad thing, or rather, a cause for celebration. There are excellent reasons to suspect the latter.

Cohen doesn’t hold a very high opinion of the Texas governor, of anyone who doesn’t buy into the notion of a looming man-made global warming disaster, or of Republicans. Referring to Perry in an Aug. 22 Washington Post article, he opined “It’s not his thinking I fear, it’s the lack of any at all.”

Cohen observed that “[Perry] occupies the cultural and intellectually empty heartland of the Republican party.” The article scorned Perry for publicly stating that he stood with an increasing number of scientists who have challenged the existence of man-made global warming threats, commenting “…whoever they (italics noted) might be. In Appleton, Wis., Sen. Joe McCarthy’s skeleton rattled a bit.” His reference to McCarthy went on to elaborate that “The late and hardly lamented demagogue pioneered the use of the concocted statistic” in suggesting that communists were literally everywhere. He further amplified “There were some, of course, just as there are some scientists who are global warming skeptics, but these few – about 2% of climate researchers – could hold their annual meeting in a phone booth, if there are any left. (Perhaps 2% of scientists think they are).”

This would require a pretty big phone booth, and actually, there really are many of those “global warming skeptics” still remaining. In fact, that number (yes- scientists with solid credentials) has been rapidly multiplying, not diminishing.

Since 2007 more than 31,000 American scientists from diverse climate-related disciplines, including more than 9,000 with Ph.D.s, have signed a public petition announcing their belief that “…there is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate.” Included are atmospheric physicists, botanists, geologists, oceanographers, and meteorologists.

A 2008 international survey of climate scientists conducted by German scientists Dennis Bray and Hans von Storch revealed deep disagreement concerning two-thirds of the 54 questions asked about their professional views, with responses to about half of those areas skewing on the “skeptic” side and no consensus to support any alarm. The majority did not believe that atmospheric models can deal with important influences of clouds, precipitation, atmospheric convention, ocean convection, or turbulence. Most also did not believe that climate models can predict precipitation, sea level rise, extreme weather events, or temperature values for the next 50 years.

A 2010 survey of media broadcast meteorologists conducted by the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication found that 83% believe global warming is mostly caused by natural, not human, causes. Those polled included members of the American Meteorological Society (AMS) and the National Weather Association. Another survey published by the AMS found that only one in four respondents agreed with UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change claims that humans are primarily responsible for recent warming.

A literature review of 928 scientific papers published on “global climate change” between 2004 and 2007 that appeared in a 2008 issue of Environment & Energy, reported that 31 (6%) of 591 explicitly or implicitly rejected the idea of consensus that more than half of warming over the past 50 years was likely to have been anthropogenic. Fewer than half endorsed consensus, and only 7% did so explicitly.

Cohen’s statement that 97% of all climate scientists believe in anthropogenic global warming can be attributed to a very brief online survey of “over 3,000 Earth scientists” published by the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in 2009 that asked “do you think human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures?” Not addressed was which human activities any affirmative answer would be linked to, such as: CO2 emissions, and land use changes including agriculture, urbanization and deforestation. Nor was it clear what the question meant by “significant contributing factors” — whether it was intended to mean that they were statistically measurable, catastrophic, or quite plausibly, even desirable.

Post Your Comment

Post Your Reply

Forbes writers have the ability to call out member comments they find particularly interesting. Called-out comments are highlighted across the Forbes network. You'll be notified if your comment is called out.

Comments

Reference information regarding the “more than 30,000 scientists” who signed the petition noted in this article was collected as part of the Science and Environmental Policy Project undertaken by the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) and can be found in the report “Climate Change Reconsidered” (2009).

These scientists include the following broad categories of professionals:

Atmosphere, Earth and Environmental Science (3,803)

Chemistry (4,818)

Computers and Math (935)

Biochemistry, Biology and Agriculture (2,964)

Medicine (3,046)

General Engineering and General Science (10,102)

Physics and Aerospace (5,810)

The Ph.D. signers alone include 15 times more scientists than were seriously involved in the IPCC process.

Further breakdowns of professional categories are listed on page 742 of the report, and petition signer names are listed on pages 745-854. A copy of the actual petition appears on page 739.

The NIPCC is/was a very small group of climate change deniers led by a scientist who hasn’t published anything peer-reviewed for 30 years. Their ‘project’ is simple propaganda replete with utter nonsense, entirely unsubstantiated and unsullied by any actual evidence.

AND, the Oregon Petition was NOT “collected as part of the Science and Environmental Policy Project”. They are simply adding that to their stew of propaganda, which they may as well do since both the project and the petition are as phony as three dollar bills.

Nice breakdown. The only problem is that it isn’t real. There was no effective means of validating any of the signatures; and even though Mr. Robinson claims that duplicate names (as many as a half dozen duplicates per name, both for individuals who exist and for fictional characters) have been eliminated, they have not.

Look, if you are intending to persist with this idiocy, I suggest you see your gerontologist and request a prescription for Aricept. You have clearly lost the ability to think rationally or to do the simplest of research…although, I suppose it could be said in your defense that you don’t have any actual knowledge of the field you’re writing about here.

Gentlemen, what are you doing? It is obvious that the author of this article and Gov. Perry have little interest in “facts” or “scientific data.” They are not operating at this level. One must remember that Gov. Perry called for teaching creationism in schools, has claimed that Texas’ public hiring spree is a result of tax reduction, and is a fundamentalist Christian.

The author’s disdain for any type of scientific approach to this subject is also clear. The author has made a political decision and is using Google to convince the “Choir.” The article is not intended to enlighten. IT is intended to propagandize.

Follow up the writer, his page links to a page where one can see his “followers” (climate change deniers), his climate change denial book, Also one can go t0 source watch:

“Bell appears to have no background in climate science. His Forbes blurb states that “Weekly columnist Larry Bell is a professor at the University of Houston and author of Climate of Corruption”; his University of Houston professorship is in “Space Architecture”, where he is director of the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture (SICSA) – an institution funded by the Sasakawa Foundation, which was founded by Ryoichi Sasakawa, “rightist and gambling figure” who was “the last living member of a group accused after World War II of the most serious war crimes” (and “gave millions of dollars to charity”).[3]; the foundation is chaired by Sasakawa’s son.[4]“

I am sorry but your reference is totally meaningless. The membership of those organizations was never asked to debate the merits of the AGW arguments and has never been asked to come up with a statement that would reflect the opinion of the average member. False claims of consensus that correlation is proof of causation are meaningless in science. If you want to support your statements show us empirical evidence that supports your thesis.

So, you don’t believe that the release of millions of years of stored carbon in the form of CO2 is having an effect on the worlds climate. Or the transition to an oil economy which has directly increased world population and changes in our food production, has an effect on climate? The use of fossil fuels has affected human existence in more ways than just one, but I’m sure the sulfur we were burning in our fuels didn’t cause acid rain either.

Just because there are people willing to exploit and make money off of climate change, doesn’t diminish the possibility of its existence. Humans are contributing to our changing climate, by how much is the only debate and if we can do anything about it.

As any ACTUAL scientist would realize after less than five minutes of ACTUAL research, the so-called Oregon Petition with 31,000 or 6000 or 19,000 or 61,000 names (depending upon who you believe and when the lie was told) has been debunked many times. After another five minutes of ACTUAL research, you would know that the names on the petition are nearly all non-scientists and non-Ph.D.’s. In fact, there are so many names of fictional and cartoon characters as to provide a solid basis for a strong belief that the ‘petition’ is a joke. It turns out, though, that Mr. Robinson, the chemist-perpetrator, is the actual joke. Well, maybe that’s not really fair. He’s really best characterized as a clown – a dark, rigidly ideological and dangerous clown.

Do not, under any circumstances follow his medical advice. It killed his wife. Also, don’t follow his advice regarding home schooling or the abolition of public education. It hasn’t helped his children. And I promise to not even get started on his program of evolution denial.

He is consistent, though. That consistency involves being unalterably opposed to ANYTHING which is considered to be true (because it’s backed by definitive empirical evidence) by 99% of the scientific community. He is determined to prove to real scientists that he’s a genius who knows far more than they do. Unfortunately for him, but fortunately for right-wingnut loons everywhere, he has no basis for his arguments. So right-wingnut loons believe everything he believes while scientists who are aware of him generally believe he needs therapy.

BTW, aside from the fact that the names on the petition are mostly phony, even if there were 31,000 names of REAL scientists on the petition (most of whom would not be climate scientists, so their opinions would be generally irrelevant), that would account for just about 1.1% of American scientists…an overwhelming majority if you’re a right-wingnut propagandist, I’m sure.

This isn’t an entirely and scrupulously honest piece, is it. I enjoy the way we had Ricky Perry “standing with a growing body of skeptical scientists” where in fact Perry said that global warming was a hoax in which scientists committed fraud for financial gain. A somewhat different thing than the benign and even-handed doubt the Professor Bell assures us Perry should not be ashamed of.

Later on, we are introduced to the good professor’s attempt to brush away the results of a poll he doesn’t care for by calling its question “ambiguous”. The question is not ambiguous at all, simply inclusive: is human presence changing the climate? Greenhouse gases, and all that good stuff, are a subset of this larger starting-point question.

“Ambiguous” on the other hand, describes very nicely Bell’s preferred poll, which, after the 9000 PhDs and the rest of the preamble finally declares that there will be no “catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere” nor “disruption of the Earth’s climate” . What is “catastrophic heating”? What happened to Venus – that kind of catastrophe? What is “disruption of the climate”? Like, a radical, life-threatening flip to a different stable state? Snowball earth, again? Would that be a “disrupted” climate? Maybe. It means what you want it to mean. It’s ambiguous.

Most of the rest of the piece leads us through a lot of numerical (hardly properly statistical) hand-waving which tells us, once the froth is blown off the top, that virtually everyone believes that human activity is making some contribution to climate change. “Less than half of the warming” or “only some of it” is about the best he can do. We are, that is, contributing 100% of the anthropogenic fraction. Whatever that fraction is – less or more that the mean estimate – it is the only fraction, obviously, that we have control over. If momentum, wind and current are controlling 90% of a ship’s course when it’s headed for a distant reef, saying “We can only change our heading 10%” isn’t a very strong argument for fatalistic passivity.

There are good arguments to be made against theories of man-made global warming, but this kind of loose tendencious flummery passed off as academic expertise is an embarrassment. And Perry was one good long step beyond even this.